Sunday morning round up

1. Finally! Academics check to see if practitioners actually read what research results, and more importantly, if the research informs their actions at all.  My favorite findings:

• Practitioners like to share articles with other practitioners—learning is a chance to engage with colleagues in a unique way
• Practitioners know that academics often talk down to them, and think that academics often underestimate what they don’t know (and can learn from practitioners).  As in:

“The problem isn’t that the practitioners don’t understand the researchers. That’s a pretty arrogant assumption on the researchers’ part. It’s more the other way around: The researchers don’t understand the dynamics that the practitioners must live with. Why not have training sessions run by practitioners for researchers?”

2. Bangladesh’s bKash is now the second largest mobile money in the world with 12 million individual accounts.  mPesa better watch out—Bangladesh has close to 150 million people (more than Tanzania, Kenya, AND Uganda combined), so there’s still a lot of room for growth.  Especially with others like BRAC in the ecosystem working on innovative ways to incorporate bkash into development work.  See the piece my colleague and I wrote for Impatient Optimist on how BRAC supported bkash in its early days, and what we’re doing now to promote adoption at the organization level.

3. Implementation is harder than public commitment, but some of the recent pieces on what’s happened in the wake of the Rana Plaza factory tragedy demonstrate just how much of the motions afterwards was about maintaining public relations versus solutions that actually create safer environments for workers.  The Dhaka Tribune reports on how the monitoring bodies set up by the US and European-based buyers can’t seem to be bothered to work together or even agree on a common set up standards—making life much more difficult for factory owners trying to understand and comply with them. 

FYI, a few weeks ago the same newspaper wrote another good piece about factories that are closing for safety reasons, and worker protests about the loss of jobs.